


Chekhov's Poem

by SekritOMG



Category: South Park
Genre: Dogs, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-21
Updated: 2015-11-21
Packaged: 2018-05-02 17:17:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5256968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SekritOMG/pseuds/SekritOMG
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Never buy anyone a puppy for their birthday -- never, ever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chekhov's Poem

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nhaingen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nhaingen/gifts).



> A belated birthday tribute to the wise and knowing old Nhaingen.

When Stan turned eighteen Kyle was broke, or at least cash-poor, saving his money in a CD he kept rolling over to eventually purchase a nose job. He never did get the nose job, but for Stan's eighteenth he spent three afternoons in a row writing a sappy acrostic poem:

_Seriously dude, I can't believe you're 18!_  
_Tomorrow I will make you buy me some cigarettes_  
_Actually just kidding, I don't smoke_  
_Not that I don't sometimes think back on that assembly about not smoking we had to listen to in grade school and consider whether I shouldn’t take up smoking_

_Maybe it's a good time to say, since_  
_After this year we'll be in college and all_  
_Really hope we end up at Boulder together_  
_So we can be roommates_  
_How awesome would that be?_  
  
_I don't know how else to tell you this_  
_So I'll just come out and say it_  
  
_Maybe you don't want to hear this_  
_You should hear it from me, though_  
  
_For some time I've wondered if we could be more than friends_  
_Really since about freshman year_  
_In the bathroom at Shakey's when you spilled a bit of Texas Pete on your shirt and had to dab it with cold water and let your hem dry under the hand dryer and I came in with you and saw how you had little black hairs peeking out from your boxers_  
_Ever since then I wondered if, when you looked at me you were thinking the same time of thing?_  
_Now I wonder if this stupid poem will keep you from wanting to room with me at Boulder if we both get in and go_  
_Don't hate me for writing you this poem, I love you, and I'm sorry, you're my best friend no matter what, and happy birthday  
_

No eighteen-year-old wants such a poem for his birthday. Stan folded up the mint-green vellum it was written on and kept it in his desk drawer for years. He felt similarly, but also, wasn’t quite sure. He felt flattered, but was put-off by the idea that Kyle had been looking at him in that bathroom when he was just trying to dab splattered hot sauce out of his favorite T-shirt. And of course, he felt guilty, because he stared at Kyle like that sometimes, too — but he didn’t write poems about it, which was the main thing. Overall Stan was more of a “poet,” not in the sense that he wrote poetry (he didn’t) but in the sense that he thought he was attuned to some kind of beauty in the outside world, and liked to express his appreciation for it, whereas Kyle had nascent computer programming skills and liked to spend time at his desk clicking around the dark web.

“You can buy anything on the dark web,” Kyle would tell Stan, and Stan’s disinterest manifested in a shrug and a “Sure, dude,” and an indulgent smile, because that softened the blow. The softest blow, however, was the blow Kyle purchased through the dark web using bitcoins for Stan’s twenty-first. They were a couple by then, and had never snorted cocaine together, though Kyle had once found some all the way in the back of his father’s desk drawer and helped himself to a pinky-nail volume; this had been back in high school. If Stan was grateful perhaps his appreciation was lost in his ambition to rack up straight As that semester for his med school applications. Kyle, who had already figured out how to make money as a part-time small-scale code de-bugger, both admired this and hinted to Stan that maybe if they both took this the sex would be great, and they would both be able to really de-stress, or something.

“I’m pretty sure the point of coke is, it’s the opposite of a de-stresser,” said Stan.

“No, but, you get so wired you can just go for like _hours_. It’ll be the best sex ever,” Kyle explained.

“The best sex ever would just be any sex where I wasn’t worried about 50 other things.”

“Well, yes, exactly.” Kyle wiggled the baggie in front of Stan’s nose. “Just try it once and if you really hate it I’ll sell the rest and give you the cash.”

“Cash?”

“Well, bitcoins.”

“What am I going to do with bitcoins?”

“Buy something else on the deep web,” said Kyle.

“Can’t we just go out to dinner for my birthday?”

“We could,” Kyle sniffed. He did not like to eat out.

Like many of Kyle’s insights into what Stan wanted, this one proved to be thankless, perhaps misguided. Later, after Kyle had coaxed Stan out of the bathroom with the promise of some kind of crazy sex, he was remiss to note that he couldn’t get hard, for some reason thought this issue would be solved by snorting more cocaine, and couldn’t answer Stan’s question: “When is this supposed to start to feel fun?”

They had dinner the next night at a pizza place near campus. “Look,” Stan said, nervously twisting a paper straw wrapper around his fingers, “I don’t think I’m cut out for that kind of fun.”

“But you never tell me what you want for your birthday, or for like — Christmas.”

“I don’t really want anything.”

“But you’ve got to have something nice, I want to give you something.”

“But you give me whatever I want anyway,” said Stan.

“Well, sure,” said Kyle. “But it’s not much!”

“I just don’t think we’re drug people. That’s not college for us.”

“I really think you just took too much.”

“I’m not doing it again,” said Stan, “no. I haven’t slept in two days. I don’t care if I took too much. Too much is too much, you know?”

“Not really?”

For days Kyle waited for the other shoe to drop, in the sense that he was sure Stan would sit him down for a talk: _I don’t think this is going to work, after all, I am very boring, and you’re a creepy fuck._ The talk never came, but until Christmas Kyle kept expecting it. At slow moments, when he was sitting at his computer by the window in his bedroom watching snow stick to the glass, he wondered if he shouldn’t use a bit more of the leftover cocaine. He missed the way it made him feel, like something great was going to happen very shortly. But that feeling was meaningless without Stan, who spent the end of the semester bundled up in the freezing-cold library basement, typing with clumsy gloved fingers while the condensation of his breath touched the edges of his worn-out textbooks. Kyle was getting a degree in philosophy and he would have felt bad about it, were he not deeply certain in his own future. He wanted that future to include Stan, but he was so sure it wasn’t — he waited, and he waited, but Stan never confirmed Kyle’s fears.

As a young adult with some money Kyle threw caution to the wind and bought Stan expensive or elaborate presents. When Stan turned twenty-four, Kyle got him a signed John Elway jersey, from the first Super Bowl victory run.

“This is really nice of you,” said Stan, “but what do I do with this?”

“Hang it up?”

“It’s just, am I the kind of person who hangs a jersey on the wall?” Kyle looked around at their apartment, which was decorated in thrift shop watercolors and other crafts, midcentury brass geometric forms and chintz plates hung off nails painted to blend in. The jersey wouldn’t have fit, it was true.

“Well, what would you prefer I get you for your birthday?” Kyle asked.

“I don’t know.”

“What is it that you really want?”

“To just finish med school without dying,” said Stan, “so I can rub it in my dad’s stupid face.”

“That’s such a bad reason to do anything! Be realistic, what do you want that you don’t have?”

“Everything, I have everything, I’m very happy.”

“Is there something I can give you in a more metaphysical sense?”

“Metaphysical how, like, super powers? Can you buy those on the dark web?”

“No, but is there something I could do, could I write you something, or make you a website?”

“You could go out with me more, when I have nights off.”

“But I hate going out,” Kyle protested. “What’s something I could _give_ you? What’s something you don’t have?”

“All the things I want are things it would be hard to do right now.”

“Like what?” Kyle asked.

“I’d get a dog if I weren’t in med school, for example.”

“Well, I don’t want a dog.”

“I know you don’t” said Stan. He sighed and put the framed jersey down, leaning it against the kitchen island where it stuck out into the living-dining room. “Thanks for this, I know I shouldn’t be ungrateful.” Stan was exhausted, still in scrubs, and still in his heavy coat; Kyle had presented the gift as soon as Stan had walked through the door.

“Oh, don’t thank me if you don’t even like it.”

“But I like that you want to _do_ things for me, that’s really nice.”

“Why do you even want to be with someone who _wants_ to _do_ things for you but can’t do them right?”

“What’s for dinner?” Stan asked. He hung up his jacket in the front closet. The discussion was over.

In the past, Kyle’s mother had told him he was book-smart and people-stupid. Almost certainly this verdict had been delivered in the context of Stan, of Kyle’s ceaseless quest to please Stan. “You do please me,” Stan would say if asked, though he could never give examples of how or when, and he constantly begged off discussions about it by claiming he was exhausted. Just before Stan’s twenty-seventh birthday they moved from north-central Illinois back to Colorado, in anticipation of his residency at UC Denver. Kyle would be forever nostalgic for their cruddy apartment in-town with thrifted paintings and a bay window with a view onto an ice cream shop where sometimes, on humid fall nights, they would wait in line twenty, thirty minutes for rocky road (for Stan) and a hot fudge sundae with peanuts _and_ sprinkles, one scoop of butter pecan and one of rainbow sherbet (ostensibly to share but, actually, for Kyle).

Apparently Stan did not share this sense of nostalgia and just wanted to move on, because he sniffed at the hoodie Kyle had wrapped up, sloppily, for Stan’s birthday, with FIGHTING ILLINI written across the chest in orange and the custom-embroidered DR MARSH on the back.

“At least it doesn’t have the Indian head on it,” Stan offered, which was faint praise.

“This wasn’t cheap, you know,” was all Kyle could manage in response.

“I don’t really want to walk around with people, like, knowing I’m a doctor?”

“Why not?”

“It’s just weird,” Stan insisted, not really explaining. He fell asleep that night with his head between Kyle’s thighs, the not-unsexy mingled scent of Freixenet and sweat heady in their mostly still-packed bedroom. Kyle was a little tipsy on the cava and he had to pee, but he didn’t flinch, just savored the breaths of Stan’s deep sleep against his naked skin.

For Stan’s twenty-eighth Kyle had offered to take him to Elway’s overpriced steakhouse. Kyle was soundly rebuffed with, “Can’t we just stay in?”

“Stay in?” Kyle was aghast. “You always want to go out for your birthday! Or just — go out, period!”

“When have I ever wanted that?”

“All the time, in college!”

“In college?” Stan was working hours-long shifts. Many of them, in a row. He was sleeping on cots in hallways and coming home with horror stories about burst implants of all kinds. “The moral is,” Stan had said a few days before, “never get anything implanted.” This was where Kyle’s rhinoplastic ambitions failed at long last.

Figuring he knew better than past experience had suggested, Kyle asked Stan what he wanted for his twenty-ninth.

“Nothing,” said Stan, as Kyle stood there gaping. Stan repeated: “Nothing. Isn’t it obvious? I don’t want anything, please don’t buy me a thing.”

“But that’s no fun,” Kyle said, “it’s your _birthday_.”

“I don’t want anything.”

“You have to want _something_ …”

“I want nothing.”

Kyle was hurt. They had a screaming argument, the first of their rather short lives. “Just give me a fucking clue,” Kyle begged, following Stan through every room in their house, like the more closely he followed, the less liable Stan would be to forget about Kyle entirely.

“I’ve given you so many clues!”

Secretly, Kyle was pleased just to have gotten a rise out of Stan. “Oh, so now we’re playing some kind of guessing game?”

“Maybe,” said Stan, “since you don’t listen when I tell you I don’t want anything from you other than just being here with me!”

“Stan, you’re being a dick!”

“It’s my birthday!”

“So that gives you the right to be a dick?”

“Kind of!” Stan shouted. And Kyle had to admit, he sort of had a point.

Kyle was out of ideas. When Stan turned thirty, Kyle finally gave in and bought him a puppy. It was a mutt with some spaniel, a sniffling four-month baby. Stan had grown up with a dog and had long wanted another, but Kyle had been hesitant — they were young, their lives unstable, uncertain about so much. Stan was such a dick about his birthdays. But there was a flyer tacked to a public notice board at work: PUPPIES, FREE TO GOOD HOMES.

“Good” was crossed out.

After lunch, Kyle wrote an e-mail to dnvrfreepuppies2goodhomes@gmail.com:

 _I think ‘good homes’ are subjective, but my boyfriend is turning 30 next week, and he would love a new puppy for ours. We’re both young professionals, in a long-term stable relationship, disease-free_ — _  
_

Kyle shook his head at how his e-mail was turning into a personal ad for a group sex partner, with which Kyle had some experience, circa Stan’s birthday present to him back when they were juniors in college. It had gone well. Kyle amended his e-mail:

 _My long-term partner and I are interested in adopting one of your puppies_.

Then, Kyle hit “send.”

A few days passed, and then a few more. Kyle was growing anxious, worried over what to get Stan for his birthday. There were options upon options, but none of the options were good, and though it occurred to Kyle that he could always ask Stan what he wanted for his birthday, it was also a possibility that the puppy people would write back. Which they did eventually, with Stan’s birthday the next day:

_yo, we got puppies. $400 a puppy_

There was a phone number at the bottom of the e-mail, and without replying, Kyle dialed it. “I was looking to adopt a puppy," he explained, tapping his nails on his desk. "And as a charitable gesture I was assuming the puppy would be, you know, without cost."

"Wha?"

"I said free, as indicated." 

"Well, there's costs associated with puppy adoption, like we gotta chip the dog, we gotta neuter the dog."

"What even," was Kyle's reaction to this news, but on the afternoon of Stan's thirtieth birthday he found himself handing over four hundred-dollar bills in a parking lot behind a gas station, where a morbidly obese woman wearing a pink sweatsuit handed him the tiniest, whiniest creature he had ever seen in his life.

"What's his name?" Kyle asked, struggling to keep the wiggling puppy in his arms.

"We been calling him 'Sunshine,' said the woman, 'though most folsk'll just rename 'em just whatever."

"How do you just change a dog's name?" Kyle asked, but she was already stuffing the bills into her purse and shuffling back toward her van.

Sunshine was a birthday gift, Kyle figured, and so he took the dog to the Paper Source to buy ribbon. By the time they'd parked Sunshine had peed in the front seat and begun to cry.

"I don't know what to do," Kyle said to the dog, but the dog didn't speak English. "I don't know what you want." Sunshine and Kyle had known each other for a 17 minutes or so, and already they were having a fundamental miscommunication.

In Kyle's own mind he was a premiere Paper Source customer, having once spent hundreds of dollars on size A6 flat cards and corresponding envelopes with the intention of using these things to put together his own wedding invitations. He had not ended up actually putting together any invitations, and he and Stan had not gotten married. It was telling of their relationship, wasn't it, that they had piles upon piles of blank pearl-white stationery sitting in a box in their attic? To Kyle's mind the Paper Source must owe him somehow, and yet they still wouldn't let him take his dog into the store.

Sunshine was crying and crying, and Kyle ended up giving a 12-year-old girl ten bucks to buy him a length of ribbon, asking her to keep the change.

"Can I also pet your puppy?" she asked.

"This dog is about four seconds from biting my face off and running away forever," said Kyle, "so, no, you may not."

The ribbon she brought him was thin, grosgrain, gingham, and brownish. "This is terrible," Kyle told her, though he was just as much referring to the dog howling in his arms as the ribbon itself.

"You're a jerk," said the girl.

"I want my change back," said Kyle, though she chose to stick her tongue out and say, "You're a loser," then go. Kyle hoofed it back to his car wishing he had a leash, for he would have liked to have put Sunshine down, all the better to find his car keys and unlock the door. It was managed, not without difficulty.

A man of few ambitions, Kyle struggled to get the sickly ribbon tied in a bow around Sunshine's neck without wondering, why? Why was it hard, why was he struggling with this, why was this expensive hick-bred scam dog garbage puppy noncompliant with his wishes?

Kyle had as many wishes as ambitions lacked. He fantasized on the drive home — in ten-second swatches when he was not clutching the dog between his chest and the steering wheel — about Stan’s reaction to the dog: “Kyle, I love you”; “Kyle, you knew just what I wanted for my birthday”; “Kyle, your dedication to my happiness makes me so grateful you’re my partner”; “Kyle, this bow is so neatly tied, especially considering you must not have had an easy time of it, given the squirming puppy and all,” and so on. Stan didn’t talk like that, no one did, but Kyle didn’t have time for editing. The dog was chewing on the collar of his cashmere sweater.

Stan’s actual reaction: “What the fuck?”

He was sitting on the couch, playing a game, and Sunshine had been in the house for all of eight seconds before pissing on the rug at Stan’s feet. “Jesus,” Stan said, getting up, grabbing the dog.

“So, this is Sunshine,” said Kyle, putting his car keys in the dish on the end table.

“Get a paper towel!” said Stan. The dog was whimpering. Stan clutched it to his chest and shushed it.

Dutifully, Kyle got paper towels, an entire roll of them.

Kyle drove to the pet store and Sunshine sat in Stan’s lap. Typically Stan drove, but from then on their lives were madness — Sunny had no crate, no leash, no food, not a collar or a toy, and though he’d had shots, he wasn’t neutered, despite what Kyle had been told over the phone. Kyle tried to gossip about the woman who’d sold him this dog, but Stan wouldn’t hear it. “Let’s not make fun of that poor woman,” he said, which was so weird; Stan loved to make fun of women along with Kyle, poor ones most of all, usually.

“I never realized puppy extortion was so profitable,” Kyle was saying.

“Are you serious? Pets are a huge industry.” This couldn’t have been less underscored by shopping for the dog’s needs. It was fun until they had to hand over their credit card. Stan sighed audibly, always worried about money. Kyle got this, sort of; Stan worked much harder for it, dealt in life and death for it. It came easy to Kyle, and while he liked money, spending hundreds on Sunshine didn’t bother him because he couldn’t correlate a bag of salmon treats with actual hours of effort on his part.

What else came easy to Kyle? Loving Sunshine, as it happened. It came as easily to Kyle as his love for Stan. It was a different kind of love but it blossomed practically overnight, with Sunshine screeching and crying to be pulled up into their bed so he could sleep with them through the night.

“Don’t do it,” Stan cautioned.

“Why not?” The dog was licking and nibbling at Kyle’s fingers.

“You’re setting a precedent. We don’t want this dog sleeping with us forever.”

“He doesn’t have to,” said Kyle. “He’s just a puppy, and it’s his first night here, and he’s so lonely.”

“He’s gotta learn, though.”

“Learn what?”

“That he can’t sleep with us every night,” said Stan, “and more to the point, that he can’t have his way all the time, and that you won’t give him everything just because he cries for it.”

“it’s just this once.”

“No it’s not,” Stan groaned, curling into the quilts. Kyle sunk into sleep with the puppy between them, his soft doggy smell hanging in the air, their three bodies a mess of limbs and hair and soft, soft fur — the bristly hairs of Stan’s shins against Kyle’s; Sunshine’s downy little ear pressed to Kyle’s naked chest.

It was bliss until it wasn’t, when Sunshine woke Kyle up before sunrise by chewing on his ear. “What’s he doing?” Kyle asked, panic in his voice. “What’s he doing, get him off me!”

Stan slept through this, or pretended to.

Sunshine chewed on Kyle’s hair, and then he cried, and then he pissed on the bathroom rug.

The dog had a sunny disposition, at least. He didn’t growl. He usually seemed pleased with himself. He ate too quickly and didn’t mind splashing water around. He ran from one end of the house to the other, sometimes chasing something but often just to run from one end of the house to the other. Stan did not believe this until he bore witness to it, three days into Sunshine’s residence. “I don’t believe it,” he said, watching the dog slip and scramble across the polished black floors. His paws clicked against the wood like Tic-Tacs rhythmically shaken in their little plastic box. Kyle thought that Stan might have meant it was unbelievable that Sunshine could jet around with such energy and seemingly never deplete it, but perhaps Stan also meant that it was truly unbelievable that they now had a dog.

Kyle himself couldn’t believe it: he was theirs, _this_ was theirs, every whimper a testament to their coupledom, their ability to own something jointly and together. There were red scrapes and jabs in Kyle’s wrists and on the backs of his hands from where Sunshine had viciously bitten him upon walking through the door, home from work.

“I think we need a trainer,” said Stan, and he wasn’t wrong, Kyle knew that.

“I can train him,” Kyle protested, but by week two he was sitting on the kitchen island where Sunshine couldn’t get him, while the dog barked and criss-crossed the tiles trying to get at Kyle’s ankles. “I can’t train him,” he admitted when Stan came home and found him halfway through a bottle of wine on the counter, the dog chewing at the leg of one of their antique dining chairs, a puddle of urine nearby. “Can you get a towel?”

“Why did you get a dog if you can’t deal with pee?” Stan asked, tossing a handful of party napkins onto the floor.

“I figured he’d just pee on the sidewalk and I wouldn’t have to deal with it.”

“Well, you were wrong about that.”

“Yes, obviously!”

But the rewards kept stacking up. When Kyle took Sunshine on walks before work, cute girls stopped him and bent over and squealed, “Oh my gosh, can I pet your dog?” Used to being written off as Stan’s weirder, fatter, less socially ambitious counterpart, it did not occur to Kyle until after these encounters that maybe there was more to it than a cute puppy. Yet no one ever said as much as “boo” to Kyle when he was in line to order a burrito at lunch, or walking back to the office while he stumbled over sidewalk cracks he failed to notice while he ate his burrito.

At night Kyle would collapse into bed, exhausted, Stan’s Listerine breath in his face and Sunshine between them, stretching his paws into the air and his soft little belly exposed. If the dog had a personality, Kyle couldn’t say. People said Stan was such a great animal lover, but Kyle had always loved them, too. It was just that he loved animals you couldn’t love in any meaningful sense: elephants, whales, big majestic mammals with hulking demeanors — that kind of thing. Yet here was little Sunshine with his baby’s curiosity and panting mouth, human eyes. Kyle kept asking himself if it was worth it, and late at night he felt that it might be. When he stepped in puddles of dog pee in the bathroom in the morning — not so much.

At the weekend Kyle’s parents had them over for dinner. Driving up to South Park with the dog in the car, that was a trip. It wasn’t a long drive but holding Sunshine in his lap for an hour was taxing. He wanted out. “Let him out the window,” Stan suggested, but the dog tried to escape, Kyle wrenching him back in from the whipping speed of 285.

“Why did you even suggest that?” Kyle asked, horrified.

“I didn’t mean you should roll it down the whole way!” Stan seemed annoyed, and so they didn’t speak for the rest of the ride.

At Kyle’s parents’, his brother stared at the dog in disbelief until Kyle said, “What, Ike?” in his snottiest tone and Ike said, “Just, why didn’t you change the dog’s name?”

“What’s wrong with his name?” Stan asked.

“Just, seems kind of — I dunno, gay,” said Ike.

“Well, _jesus_ , Ike,” Kyle said, because how else should be respond?

Kyle’s mother took him aside, a steaming mug in her hands. “Do you really think this was a smart decision?” she asked. “What about your priorities?” She took a sip of coffee and her lips left a mauve imprint on the rim, which always sickened Kyle. It probably made his response less considered, more bitter:

“What priorities?” he snapped. “Look at you, you’re a housewife. Lecture me about priorities!”

“It’s just, a dog is like a baby.”

“Oh, thanks, Ma, I didn’t realize that, I’ve just spent two weeks mopping dog pee off the floor.”

“You’ve been mopping up pee?”

“Well, no, I leave it for Stan, I mean — what?”

“You should be focusing on your career right now, you know?”

Groaning, Kyle yanked the dog right out of Stan’s lap. “We’re going to go see Stan’s parents!” he announced. “They at least know they can’t lecture us about our life choices! So if you want us, we’ll be over there!” Stan’s parents lived next door.

It was true that the Marshes didn’t lecture Stan and Kyle; they were accepting to the point of disinterest, which was something that bothered Stan. Trying to win their attention caused him to work super hard, which was something Kyle could get behind. On the other hand, Randy Marsh opened the door for him half-drunk mid-Saturday in his underwear, looked down at Sunshine and asked, “Where’d you get that?”

“He was a birthday gift,” said Stan.

“Out of a van,” said Kyle.

“What van?” Randy asked, as if perhaps he would know what van.

“This is Sunshine.” Stan held him up like the beginning of _The_ _Lion King_.

“That’s a gay name for a dog,” said Randy.

“Whatever,” said Stan, “is Mom home?”

“Yeah, I dunno, I guess she’s in the kitchen or something.”

“Thank god.” Stan pushed his way into the house, and they sat in the kitchen with Sharon. She bitched about how at the recent meeting of their book club Laura Tucker had gotten into an argument with Stephen Stotch over whether or not female genital mutilation was okay. “ ‘It’s their culture,’ he kept saying,” Stan’s mother tried to explain, “and Laura just kept saying, ‘It’s sick,’ can you believe it?”

“It is sick,” said Stan.

“Sure,” said his mom, “but we were supposed to be discussing _Carry On_.”

“What, really?” asked Kyle, who made a point to read anything mainstream that even so much as teased male-male romance. “Wait, where’d Sunshine go?”

“Oh, Sparky used to wander around all the time,” said Sharon. “He’ll be fine, don’t worry.”

Kyle told himself not to worry. Then Sunshine became violently ill after Randy fed him three raw venison sausage links out of the downstairs freezer chest.

“What?” Stan’s father kept asking, “What, he loved it, what?”

“Of course he fucking loved it,” said Stan, the dog running circles around his ankles. Sunshine, for whatever reason, felt much better now.

“Well, what’s that supposed to mean?”

Stan shrugged this off like he shrugged off so much, mumbling, “Whatever” and clamming up until they headed back to the city. In the car, Stan was very quiet, Sunshine pawing at one of his legs. “Oh,” he said, looking over for a moment—not too long, as he had to keep his eyes on the road.

“Oh what?” Kyle asked, smoothing over the fur on the dog’s still rump.

“Just, I thought it was you for a sec.”

“Me?”

“Touching my leg.”

“No, that was Sunshine,” said Kyle, “I’ve just been sitting here.”

“Okay.” Stan turned up the radio and didn’t look at Kyle for the rest of the drive.

Back home, the dog collapsed on the mat by the door to the deck off the kitchen, Stan bent over the sink and pried open a can of wet food.

Kyle sat at the counter and used a lint roller to clean up his pants. “We never really have to go back there.”

“Thanksgiving.” Stan grabbed a bowl from the cabinet; they’d never bought special dishes for Sunshine and it seemed inevitable that they never would.

“Who says we have to go back there for Thanksgiving?”

“And do what instead, Kyle?”

“Stay here for Thanksgiving.”

Stan put the bowl by the end of the counter; while it was still in his hand, feet above the floor, Sunshine was already jumping for it, with Stan saying, “Hey, calm down,” as if Sunshine knew what that meant exactly. They both talked to the dog in conversational admonishments, mostly in the form of a question: “What are you doing?” “What do you think?” “Why are you hungry? You just ate.” When the bowl hit the floor Sunshine buried his face in it.

Sheila wasn’t wrong; it was like having a baby, or so Kyle imagined: interrupted sleep, messes to clean, gross begging for attention at inopportune times. They’d tried to have sex once and the dog’s claws scraping on their bedroom door presented serious difficulty. Now that he was used to sleeping in their bed, Sunshine made such a fuss when they tried to extract him.

“You just have to bear it,” said Stan, and Kyle knew Stan was right, but Kyle didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want to bear it up to the point that he found himself jerking off in the handicapped bathroom at work, simply because his preferred methods of sexual relief had all been forestalled by Sunshine, or the memory of Sunshine, or the guilt that came with putting Sunshine out for any reason. Kyle didn’t want to live like this, nearly 30 and totally sexless, his life taken over by a mutt he’d bought for hundreds of dollars from the back of a van. If Kyle was going to buy anything out of the back of a van for hundreds of dollars, he’d always figured, it would have to be either a really cute piece of vintage furniture, or some kind of new Quaalude that didn’t come cheaply.

Kyle was sick of bearing it. He didn’t want to bear it anymore. Sunshine had left such angry red marks in his forearms that the people he worked with were beginning to ask if he was okay, or if he needed help, or maybe a place to stay? All they knew of Stan was that he was a doctor and that he was very handsome, or at least, Kyle hoped they had inferred that from the photo he kept on his desk. They did not know that Kyle had known Stan since he was in literal diapers; Kyle actually prayed they never found out. It was embarrassing. When people expressed concern for Kyle’s fucked-up arms, he said, “Oh, we got a puppy,” but because no one Kyle worked with knew anything about him other than that he was fat and gay and not polite and living with someone _way_ out of his league, perhaps the skeptical “uh huh” he would get in response rubbed him the wrong way.

For Halloween, Stan and Kyle had gotten Sunshine a little Viking costume. He’d whined and scratched at the horned bonnet Velcroed to his head, but the way his little ears peeked out from under it made him look so cute, Kyle made him wear it all night, making sure he had Sunshine in his arms every time trick-or-treaters came to the door. Now Kyle went to Target and printed a picture of Stan holding Sunshine in his Viking garb. It was annoying, because Stan looked tired, but no matter. He bought a cheap frame and put the picture on his desk. He got a lot of, “He’s so precious!” And Kyle would feign misunderstanding and say, “He is, I know — _oh_ , of course, you mean the dog.” He didn’t bitch to his coworkers about how he’d stepped in pee that morning and spent 20 minutes scrubbing the bottom of his foot raw, nor did he mention that Sunshine had gotten into the drawer where they kept the dog stuff and eaten, in addition to half a bag of foul-smelling salmon treats, part of that adorable Viking helmet. This was the second drawer Sunshine had gotten into recently; the first had just contained some tax returns their accountant had copies of, thank god. Every afternoon Kyle’s first action on returning from work was checking the drawer with their sex stuff, including a really nice leather paddle they’d literally never used, and multiple dildos of varying sizes. All of it looked like dog toys. Any day now, Kyle kept thing to himself, any day now. But, he didn’t do anything about it, either.

For many years now Kyle and Stan had attended two Thanksgivings, one with each of their families, separately. Their parents lived next door to each other — Kyle would never mention that sort of detail to anyone he met in his adult life. That he grew up wanting to be banged, forever and exclusively, by the kid he used to see changing for bed from his brother’s window when their mother read them bedtime stories — that was the ultimate embarrassment. People would find out over Kyle’s dead body, literally; when he died and they all went to the funeral he was sure some loudmouth would drop that little factoid gem into a eulogy. When he could type without feeling every tooth mark in his fingers, he would pre-draft some kind of generic words for pre-assigned parties to read over his casket. In any case, despite their proximity — despite the fact that their parents socialized without them quite infrequently — they would have dinner first around 3 p.m. with the Marshes and then sit down with Kyle’s parents around 8. Sheila would bitch about how it was horrible to sit down so early for a _goyishe_ Thanksgiving, and Stan would try to explain that, no, his dad just wanted to get drunk and watch football.

Stan was always in a bad mood on the drive up, so Kyle distracted him with theories concerning what Sunshine would do to cause holiday mayhem.

“He’s gonna bite my sister’s baby,” Stan theorized.

“I see him as more of a Turkey-humper, if we’re being honest,” Kyle said. “If you want to know what I think.”

“The bottom line is really that it’s hard to ruin the actual worst day of the year. The bar is so low already.” This was the only holiday they had to split between their families.

It was Shelly’s first encounter with the dog, and she held her baby aloft while Sunshine pulled at her long, silk skirt. She’d come all the way from Paris and was tired and full of stories about how the French were very accommodating and they didn’t blink an eye at the parents not being together and she had months and months of maternity leave, and it all sounded very enviable. Kyle did not point out that he deserved maternity leave for the puppy-rearing he’d been doing, or that Shelly could cloak her out-of-wedlock half-Gaul baby in all the European cultural specificity she liked, but back here in America she was a single mother with some bastard baby and he was going to spend the meal judging her silently.

She looked thin, though. “You look thin,” Kyle said, in an attempt to disguise his disdain.

“Thanks,” she said. “You’re, uh.” They hadn’t seen each other in two years and he just prayed she didn’t vocalize what she was seeing. “Nice to see you.”

She handed him the baby, whose name was Etienne. Kyle wrinkled his nose but felt a flash of pride when Sunshine barked and barked at him, fiercely, so long as he held the baby.

Stan, who’d never met the baby before and liked babies less than Kyle did, patted him on the head and went to go help his father with the deep fryer. “If he wants my help,” Stan said, with that throb of neediness he got whenever he was over at his parents’.

“Go help my mother,” said Shelly, as she took the baby back. “I can watch your dog.”

“We’ve got this bag of treats and stuff—”

“I grew up with a dog,” she said, as she settled into Stan’s grandfather’s old armchair, nestling the baby to her chest. “He’ll be fine.”

In the kitchen, Sharon was less than receptive to Kyle’s offer of assistance, “No, I think I’ve got it taken care of here,” she said. She was preparing cranberry sauce, watching them pop in a medium saucepan. She didn’t so much as glance up at Kyle. It would be a smallish meal: The immediate family, Stan’s uncles, Skeeter from the bar who had no place else to go, Stephen Stotch who was being ostracized from his own family for his stance on clitoridectomy, and Nelson from the USGS. Kyle didn’t like the vast majority of these people, though he took some delight in the fact that his in-laws cobbled together an assemblage of the town’s literal worst and least-wanted people. Then again, his own parents’ Thanksgiving was epic, with many families from the synagogue and his brother’s girlfriend and her whole extended clan, plus his aunt and cousin in from the East Coast, and if that didn’t add up to two dozen Kyle must have miscounted. The nice thing about such a large group was that it was easy to get lost. Stan would drive home and had to get his drinking over with before getting up from his parents’ table, but Kyle could drown his sorrows deep into the night. Sunshine had never seen him drunk before. Something about that was exciting.

Stephen came over early and talked Kyle’s ear off about how it wasn’t right to be excommunicated from his own family. “Linda said, well, now I know why you could never find mine, which I really don’t think is fair — it’s not like she gave me directions! You’ve got to tell people these things, It’s not like I cut her offs, I just said, we can’t understand what those people in Africa do, so who are we to tell them what’s right?”

The most upsetting thing about this exchange, to Kyle, was the kernel of truth buried in it. “Are you sure you don’t want to go help Randy with the turkey?”

“No, I’ve got very delicate hands.” He showed them to Kyle, then made a face.

“What?” Kyle asked.

“It looks like you got your arms stuck in the gears of some kind of — cherry picker.”

“No, we got a dog.”

“Oh? Where is he?”

“Shelly’s watching him.” There was an odd lull between them. Kyle cleared his throat. “How’s Butters?”

“Same as ever. All alone on Thanksgiving with his mother, poor little guy.”

“Poor little girl?” Kyle asked, so he didn’t have to correct Butters’ father.

“Yeah, or whatever. Poor Butters. I wasn’t strict enough with her, you know?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“You said you got a dog? You make sure you’re strict with it. The problem today is, people don’t understand how to discipline anymore.”

“Well, I’d better go find my dog, then.” Stan’s mother had given Kyle had one job and it was to distract that guy. But, that was hopeless, so he headed back into the living room to find Sunshine, who wasn’t there. Nor was he in the kitchen, the dining room, or out back, with Stan. Stan had the drawn look of someone whose patience was being pressed. He shook his head, gesturing at the pile of empty beer cans littering the patio.

“Try upstairs,” said Randy, or in the basement.

Kyle was hopeful that Sunshine hadn’t gotten down there again, and so he went upstairs first. A soft light was emanating from Stan’s old bedroom, along with the rustle of paper and the high-pitched cooing that people only showered upon babies, and dogs.

Poking his head in, Kyle found Shelly sitting with the baby and the whole room stripped bare. Trash bags lined the perimeter of the room. One of them was split open; Sunshine had torn into it and was having a field day, gnawing on papers.

“What’s going on in here?” Kyle asked.

“We’re just sitting,” said Shelly.

“No,” said Kyle, “I mean — the bags.”

“Oh!” She sat up straighter. She looked guilty. Her breasts looked larger now, and Kyle was grateful she wasn’t actively nursing. Maybe French women didn’t do that.

“My mom’s converting this room into a nursery,” she said, “for Etienne.”

Kyle wasn’t sure what it meant, but he felt a shock of pain in his chest. “But — this is Stan’s room!”

“So?”

“Well, where’s Stan supposed to sleep if he stays over?”

“The couch, I guess.”

“Shelly, you live on the other side of the world.”

“And I told my mom if she wants to see Etienne, she’d better do something about it,” Shelly said.

“Oh, lord. Sunshine, drop it!” With the paper in his mouth, Sunshine ran toward Kyle. He knelt down and said, “Drop it!”

To Kyle’s great surprise, Sunshine did.

It was stiff and seemed discolored, but Kyle recognized it right away. He knew he shouldn’t check, but the mint color and the vellum finish were unmistakable. At the top of the page he began to read, silently:

 _For some time I've wondered if we could be more than friends_  
_Really since about freshman year_  
_In the bathroom at Shakey's_

The line kept going but Kyle halted. He looked up, at Shelly. “You’re throwing this away?”

“What is it?” she asked.

“This is—” Kyle looked down at Sunshine, who was seated, looking up to Kyle with expectation. Trying not to choke up, he said, “I wrote this for Stan, when we were kids.”

“Oh no,” she said, “is that the infamous hot sauce poem?”

Kyle nearly choked. “The ‘infamous hot sauce poem’?”

“He spilled the hot sauce, and you were checking out his ass or something?”

“What the fuck! You _read it_?”

“We all read it,” said Shelly.

“Who’s you all?”

“The whole family,” said Shelly, “the little twerp left it in his drawer for ten years.”

“It’s twelve and that doesn’t make it right!” Kyle barked. “But you read it and you were going to throw it away?”

She shrugged. “My mom said to get rid of it.”

Kyle groaned. He was infuriated. He stomped out of the room, hollering, “Come on, Sunshine!”

For the first time, Sunshine followed.

He ran into Jimbo in the living room. “Did you meet the baby?” Jimbo asked.

“Fuck off, Jimbo,” Kyle shoved him out of the way, or tried to; Jimbo was huge. Kyle felt guilty instantly, because Jimbo didn’t deserve the brunt of his anger. Nor did Stephen Stotch, who got the finger for asking Kyle, “When are we eating?” Nor Ned, who had barely raised his electro-larynx to his throat before Kyle swept past him, furious. In the kitchen, Sharon asked, “Is that your little poem?” But Kyle paid her no mind, either, as he stepped outside and, Sunshine at his heels, walked right up to Stan, raised the half-eaten sheet of vellum up, and said, “They were throwing this away!”

Stan took it; the paper was so transparent that Kyle could see the pads of Stan’s fingers resting on the paper’s other side.

“Maybe we should go say hi to your parents,” he said.

“Maybe we should,” Kyle agreed.

“Hey, Stan?” Randy asked, apparently oblivious to everything. “Hand me the — oh.” He took a sip of his beer. “That’s that gay little poem.”

“We’re going,” said Stan. He folded it up neatly, and slipped it into his back pocket.

Kyle was freezing on the front stoop, his jacket still inside. Sunshine in his arms, he looked at Stan through teary eyes. “I was so stupid,” he said.

“You weren’t stupid,” said Stan, “you were young, and in love, and kinda — well, gay.”

“Meaning lame?”

Stan shook his head.

“I shouldn’t have tried to make us something we weren’t,” said Kyle.

“But nobody is anything unless they try to make it so,” said Stan. “I guess what I mean is, it’s good that you did, because I’m not great at, um. Saying what I think, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Kyle agreed. “I mean, no, you’re sure not.” The dog began to struggle, and Kyle gripped him more tightly. “But you weren’t in love with me, you know? I was such a fucking idiot. I still am, jesus.”

“You weren’t an idiot! I wasn’t in love with you when you gave me that poem, okay, but it got me thinking. It was earnest, and that was more than I deserved, and it got me thinking and then I _fell_ in love with you — maybe not right away, but, eventually. I’m fucking glad you wrote that poem for me, and I hate them for not taking it seriously. I have a lot of reasons to storm out of that house, I guess, but they can’t make fun of you. Talk about a group of people whose priorities are out of wack. It just — it makes me angry.”

“They should be angry at your sister and her out-of-wedlock baby, if anything.”

“Well, no, that’s — _look_. We could do it. For real, this time.”

“Do what?”

“Be in wedlock,” said Stan. “To legitimate Sunshine’s birthright. To secure his inheritance, I guess.”

“Don’t,” said Kyle. “Don’t even, not like this, on the stoop.”

“Okay,” Stan agreed. “But when you’re ready, let me know.”

They did it the week of Christmas, at Denver’s city hall. A lone little clerk wearing a Santa hat issued them the license, and she beamed like she had a stake in the affair. It was unceremonious — literally, without a ceremony. “A gift to each other,” Stan called it, but Kyle paid the thirty dollars, in cash. They stopped at the Kriser’s on Colfax on the way home and got Sunshine a bag of pig’s ears. He lay on the living room carpet gnawing at it while Stan got the stapler out of the junk drawer in the kitchen. He fixed the license to the sheet of vellum.

Kyle was sitting with Sunshine on the rug when Stan handed him the papers. “The two best gifts you’ve ever given me,” he said.

“You mean, the poem and paying for the license?” Kyle asked. “Please, it was thirty bucks.”

“I meant you,” said Stan, “and Sunshine.”


End file.
